


Crowns

by crowroad



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Abandonment, Birds, Blood Loss, Brotherly Love, Dean Hates Witches, Dogs, Hallucinations, Lonely Highways, Memories, Obsessive Dean Winchester, Protective Sam Winchester, Sick Dean Winchester, Supernatural Illnesses, Time Skips, Transformation, Witches, hexes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-29
Updated: 2015-04-29
Packaged: 2018-03-26 06:29:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3840556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowroad/pseuds/crowroad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They met a witch on the road to Ashland, and time started running all wrong.</p><p>Or: Sammy's going to fly away, one of these days.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crowns

 

 

_“Palms of victory, crowns of glory, palms of victory I shall wear.”—“The Way-Worn Traveler”_

There's nothing worse than a beautiful thing that has no need of you.

Or the loneliest dog in the world.

Wayside herbs, haunted in themselves.

Places where you can get your heart broken for free.

Which is all places, in the end.

*****

Nebraska is severe; Iowa moderate, the dryline shifting rotation-risk east to west, tornadic roots seeking the mud-sucked earth. They drive and duck to watch the sky, tearing it up a little, shucking their hunt-dust. Sam’s hand finds Dean’s shoulder at the last exit before Ashland.

“We should stop.”

Dean looks at him.

“You tired?”

“No, just—“ Sam dips his head, glances up at the overhead, nimbus inverted tombstone over the yellow grass.

“Next exit,” Dean says. A glint catches in one of Sam’s eyes, makes tiger of it; the road crunches, thumps, sings like a field-edge with summer coming on.

There’s a memorial before the turnoff, mile-markered, cross, dark rock painted “AL”, dead petals, hawk up above.

*****

They killed a witch in Iowa, but it wasn’t that they planned to.

“You need him,” she said to Dean, little silver knife on a chain, flush to her left breast, “like a crow needs a crown.”

“As in not at all?” Dean said, “like, you know, fish, bicycle?"

She laughed, pointed her fingers directly at his eyes, a stabbing.

*****

In Illinois the week before Sam slept off a funk while Dean watched, him and news of the weird and him, breathing, quieter with Dean sitting on the bed, legs stretched out, one hand on the pillow near Sam’s ear. In Indiana Dean, twice stabbed, let Sam feed him something weird because he was too weak from blood loss to sit up, and he wouldn’t let Sam take him to a hospital.

"Beet juice,” Sam said, shaking a bottle. The moon went red that night and there was a disturbance in the cemetery they couldn’t salt away. Dean drank what Sam gave him and must’ve made blood quick and was upright in the parking lot at dawn, banging non-anemically on the wheel; _let’s go, let’s go._

A blackbird watched from a wire and he flipped it off; nothing against blackbirds but black paint and bird shit just don’t…

Sam came out of the motel room with two bags, looked up at the sky, raised his arms comically duffel-slung wide, disappeared.

*****

There was a memorial on Route 1, Hardin County, Illinois, marked “W”, a shoe-sole there, maybe a feather, some cans, chicken bones, a little path of broke-heart destruction.

*****

“See into your heart, man-child,” the witch said, all eyelashes, like it was the first time anyone had said that. There was a cornfield in her backyard.

“You think we’re all bad, dark of the moon and and blood rites and bodily fluids, but it isn’t like that, magic.” Her hands cut the air, quick. “It’s clean. Like a blade. It’s in the will. And you ought to know about that.”

“I know your friends aren’t going to snack on the hearts of any more soccer dads.”

“That’s got nothing to do with my friends,” the witch said, “and you know it.”

“Right.”

She looked at him and he tasted iron.

“I can make your brother a bird. He’s going to fly off and leave you anyway, one byway or the other. Already has, will again.”

“Not today.”

“Every day a little more,” she said, “Every day after, again and again. I can make it easier.”

She must have blown something shining off her palms, into his eyes, must have, because he blinked and no-one was there.

*****

There’s a crow in the parking lot, drinking from a puddle.

Dean stumbles into room 16 and books it to the bathroom.

“Dean?” Sam says.

“Jesus fuck,” Dean says, leans over to heave into the sink, tastes iron.

Sam’s hand goes to the middle of his back, stays there.

He heaves again and Sam reaches over to turn on the water.

“Jeez.”

Dean spits, swears, splashes his face, lets Sam turn him by the shoulders.

“What’s this, hex or bad sandwich?”

“Not sure.” He’s sweating, cold in the middle, too.

Sam palms his forehead and starts picking at his pockets, his cuffs, his jean legs; Dean pushes him off when he gets to the socks.

“I’m alright, think it’s just…”

“You want to lie down?”

“Yeah, OK.”

He does, goes under, wakes to find Sam’s put him in a warm blanket and a cold towel, shrugs them both off and groans at the light coming in off the parking lot.

“Hey. How’re you feeling?”

“Uh.”

Sam sits, takes his wrist all business, worry in the brows.

“That good? Drink this.”

There’s a cup on the nightstand, some kind of sludge, semi-warm.

“Good for nausea,” Sam says, “and sorcery.”

It’s not half bad, whatever it is, and twenty minutes later he sits up and feels better, but for the cold in the middle.

*****

“Oh, boy,” the witch said, in her yellow kitchen, got him sitting down somehow, pinned, “I’ll tell you my name, if you want.”

“No thanks.”

Her fingers locked around his wrist, handcuff-hard.

“This is what it’s like.”

“What?”

"What do you think?"

She tilted her head, let him pull away.

“I can make it easier.” A red curl fell out from underneath her knit cap.

“That a dye job?” he said, “because a red-headed witch…”

“Is something of a cliché, I know, “ she said, “my sister was a redhead.”

“So?”  He twitched a bicep, tugged against the bonds he couldn’t see.

“She’s dead,” said the witch, “everything I do is for her.”

“Great.”

She snapped and he slipped down the wall, went beam-to on the old linoleum, caught the clock-hands cycloning back.

*****

There’s a blackbird sitting on the fence, reflected in the shine of Baby’s hood.

“You inventory the knives?” John says.

“Yes sir.”

Sam’s playing with a model rocket in the drive, and John turns to look at him with his mouth pulled down. Sam smiles anyway, his eyes black as tar, head tilted to the sky.

It’s winter in Wyoming and there are fields of wheat and they’re smiling, all holy water and sunshine. They’re ten and fourteen, they’re eight and twelve, they’re four and eight. All of their ages line up in rows in the fields and collide and tip and Sam spins in the sun and turns into a flock and whistles up into the air.

There’s a crow straight out of Stull perched on Baby’s roof, and she’s a one, isn’t she, sleek as shined shit.

“What,” Sam says, “the hell.” His eyes are cold. He has no pulse. Dean drives to the nearest crossroads and sets to digging.

There’s a yellow dog wearing a crown of dry roses by the side of the road, sitting bony-haunched next to a cross marked “Dad.”

“He doesn’t need you, never has,” the witch whispers.

Dean is forty-five, scarred and alone, somewhere.

*****

He hates witches. He can’t wake up. He wants to go home.

“Dean,” an angel says, “your brother is a crow.”

“Thanks for that, Cas.”

A hand lights on his forearm and brands a mark there, holds him still like a shiny, shiny thing.

*****

“Oh, boy,” said the witch, in her yellow kitchen, “you better get it together.”

“Says the one who eats hearts and can’t let go of her dead sister.”

“Takes one to know one,” she said. Something twisted in his cold middle, squeezed hard.

“Tell me,” the witch said, “why people want to make sacred the places they get hurt, break their bones, die, turn into ghosts. Over and over again.”

“Go to hell,” he said.

“Sometimes,” said the witch.

*****

In Indiana Sam cut the head off a corn-fed teenage vampire and shouted, “Jesus Christ, Dean.” Grunted the way he does, somehow with guilt in it, when the body fell.

Dean only got stabbed twice, in the ribs, kind of close to the heart, not all that deep.

He wouldn’t go to the hospital, drank something thick and weird because Sam said so, and blew a kiss to a blackbird on a wire the next day.

There was a yellow dog at the motel, bent stalks along the access road behind the gas station.

When that bird flew away it left a blacktop-shimmer in the air.

The absences things leave are kind of, _beautiful,_ Sam said once, and Dean raised a brow, tuned the station to _you’re a freak, Sammy._

Sure they’re beautiful.

But you can’t hold them, can you.

*****

Sam is standing at the crossroads of College and Hell, dressed in a dusty black country-lawyer suit, hair shining like a damn halo, grinning with his thumb stuck out, smiling the summoning smile, laughing.

Before Dean can pull over, shout stop, stop now, his brother catches a dust devil by the horns, vanishes into the vortex.

Sam’s haunting the edge of a field, somewhere. The witch holds his hand, strokes his palm.They’re putting up a pyre, lay branches on the spot, burn them hot, white in the star-picked dusk, ghost and witch burning a body that isn’t even there.

The flames go up into a sickle moon.

Sam, transparent for takeoff, bends to the bones, blows on the sparks, whispers, “now you’re gone.”

*****

Dean sputters, shrugs off a blanket, a wet towel.

There’s light from the window. Motel parking lot. It freaking hurts.

“Shit, Dean,” Sam says, plants a hand on his chest, “stay down. I thought…I don’t know what I thought. You looked pretty bad there for awhile.”

The room smells like burnt herbs. Wet heaps here and there. Mug of something. Shadows and shirts, bunched up and rent. Something took some undoing.

He tries to sit up again and Sam’s mouth tightens;his hands press down and hold steady.

“The witch is dead,” Sam says, “I think.”

Something warms, cools again, under Dean's ribs.

*****

“My friends had nothing to do with it,” the witch said, “you know it.”

“I can make it easier,” she said. She had eyes, gold and gray and blue like rocks in a stream. She had a tattoo, feathers inked around her right wrist. She walked and he heard crows, and clouds, kind you can't see through, followed after.

*****

White cross, mile marker 18, circle of flowering vine hung from it. Ashland. Storm incoming.

Sam’s not a bird at all, looking out the windshield at tombstones over yellow grass.

“We should stop,” Sam says, _leave the sky to the things that know how to lift off_.

“What did she say to you, anyway?” Sam says.

“The witch? Nothing,” Dean says, “just the shit witches say."  _It’s clean; it’s quick; it’s in the will._

They’ll pull over at the next exit and sleep, beat the storm, listen to the rain beat on the cheap roof of not-home.

By Tuesday they’ll be in Wyoming, open and loping, scree-haunted wind, pronghorn on the move under the big bowl of heaven.

“Yeah,” Sam, says, _not today_. His eyes are open wide, lashes like barbs pinioned to sky, and he smiles at Dean like that, like that.

 

 

 


End file.
